Paris Nocturne

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I’M TRYING TO remember what I could have been doing so late, on the night of the accident, around Place des Pyramides. I should explain that, during that period, every time I crossed over from the Left Bank I was happy, as if all I needed was to cross the Seine to be lifted out of my stupor. Suddenly there would be electricity in the air. Something was finally going to happen to me.

I probably attach too much importance to topography. I had often wondered why, in the space of a few years, the places where I would meet my father gradually moved from the area around the Champs-Élysées towards Porte d’Orléans. I even remember unfolding a map of Paris in my hotel room on Rue de la Voie-Verte. With a red ballpoint pen, I marked crosses that I used as reference points. It had all started in an area with L’ÉTOILE at the centre of gravity, with exit routes running away to the east in the direction of Bois de Boulogne. Then Avenue des Champs-Élysées. We had slipped imperceptibly past the Madeleine and the Grands Boulevards towards the Opéra neighbourhood. Then further south, near the Palais-Royal for a few months — long enough for me to think that he had finally found somewhere to settle — where I would meet my father at the Ruc Univers. We were getting closer to a border that I tried to mark off on my map. From the Ruc we moved to the Corona café, on the corner of Place Saint-Germain-l’Auxerrois and Quai du Louvre. Yes, I think that’s where the border lay.

He always arranged to meet at around nine o’clock at night. The café was about to close. We were the only customers left in the back room. The traffic along the quays had died down by then and we could hear the Saint-Germain-l’Auxerrois clock strike the quarter hours. It was there that I first noticed his threadbare suit and the missing buttons from his navy-blue overcoat. But his shoes were immaculately polished. I wouldn’t go as far as to say that he looked like an out-of-work musician, more like an adventurist after a stint in prison. Business was getting worse and worse. The spark and agility of youth had gone. From Saint-Germain-l’Auxerrois we finished up around Porte d’Orléans. And then, one last time, I watched his silhouette disappear into a foggy November morning — a reddish-brown fog — around Montrouge and Châtillon. He was heading towards these two neighbourhoods, each of which has a fort where they used to shoot people at dawn.

I often found myself, sometime later, making the same journey in reverse. At around nine o’clock at night, I would leave the Right Bank, cross the Seine at Pont des Arts, and find myself at the Corona café. But this time, I was alone at one of the tables in the back room and I no longer needed to find something to say to the shifty-looking guy in the navy-blue overcoat. I began to feel a sense of relief. On the other side of the river I left behind a marshy zone where I was starting to flounder. I had set foot on solid ground. The lights were brighter here. I could hear the neon buzz. Soon I would be walking in the open air, through the arcades, up to Place de la Concorde. The night would be clear and still. The future opened out before me. I was alone at Place de la Concorde and could hear the Saint-Germain-l’Auxerrois clock strike the quarter hours. I couldn’t help thinking about Bouvière’s disciples and the few meetings I had attended those past weeks. They were always held in cafés around Denfert-Rochereau. Apart from one evening, further south, Rue d’Alésia, at the Terminus, where I had sometimes met up with my father. That night, I had imagined him and Bouvière meeting. Two very different worlds. Bouvière, a bit pompous, with a whole string of diplomas and protected by his status of doctor and guru. My father, more reckless and whose only education was the street. Both of them crooks, each in his own way.

At the last meeting, Bouvière brought roneos and I learned from the young man with the hawkish face that he gave the same lectures at some university or school of advanced studies whose name I can no longer recall. They all attended the lectures, but I really couldn’t bear to sit in a row on those school benches with the others. Boarding school and the barracks were enough for me. On the night that the hawk distributed notes while Bouvière was getting settled on the moleskin banquette, I gestured to him discreetly that I didn’t need one. The hawk gave me a disapproving look. I didn’t want to upset him, so I took one. Later on I tried to read it in my room but I couldn’t follow it beyond the first page. It was as if I could still hear Bouvière’s voice. It was neither feminine nor masculine; there was something smooth about it, something cold and smooth, which had no effect on me, but it must have gradually sneaked up on the others, inducing a kind of paralysis that left them under his spell.

Yesterday afternoon his features came back to me with photographic precision: cheekbones, small, pale eyes set deep in their sockets. A skull. Fleshy lips, oddly contoured. And that voice, so cold and smooth…I remember at that time, there were other skulls like his, a few gurus and sages, and sects in which people my age searched for a political doctrine, a strict dogma, or some great helmsman to whom they could devote themselves body and soul. I don’t know why I managed to escape these dangers. I was just as vulnerable as the rest. Nothing really distinguished me from all the other disorientated listeners who congregated around Bouvière. I, too, needed some certainties. How on earth had I avoided his trap? Thank goodness for my laziness and indifference. And perhaps I also owe it to my matter-of-fact nature, my connection to concrete details. That man wore a pink tie. And this woman’s perfume smelled like tuberose. Avenue Carnot is on an incline. Have you noticed that on certain streets in the late afternoon, the sun is in your eyes? They took me for a fool.

*

They would have been really disappointed if I had admitted to one of the reasons I attended their meetings. Among them I had noticed someone who seemed more intriguing than the others, a certain Hélène Navachine. A brunette with blue eyes. She was the only one who didn’t take notes. The blonde girl who was always in Bouvière’s shadow regarded her with suspicion, as if she might be a rival, and yet Bouvière never paid her any attention. This Hélène Navachine didn’t seem to know any other members of the group and didn’t speak to anyone. At the end of the meetings I watched her leave alone, cross the square and disappear into the entrance of the metro. One evening, she had a music theory exercise book on her lap. After the meeting, I asked her if she was a musician, and we walked together, side by side. She earned her living by giving piano lessons, but she hoped to get into the Conservatorium.

That evening I took the metro with her. She told me she lived near Gare de Lyon. So that I could accompany her all the way, I invented a meeting in the neighbourhood. Years later, when I was on the same above-ground metro line, between Denfert-Rochereau and Place d’Italie, I wished for a moment that time would dissolve so that I might find myself sitting, once again, on the seat beside Hélène Navachine. A strong feeling of emptiness then swept over me. For reassurance, I told myself it was because the metro was running above the boulevard and rows of buildings. Once the line went underground again, I would no longer feel that sensation of vertigo and loss anymore. Everything would fall back into place, into the reassuring day-after-day monotony.

That evening, we were almost the only people in the carriage. It was well after rush hour. I asked her why she went to Bouvière’s meetings. Without knowing who he was, she had read an article of his on Hindu music that she found enlightening, but the man himself had disappointed her a little and his ‘teachings’ were not up to the standard of the article. She would give it to me to read if I wanted.

What had led me to the groups around Denfert-Rochereau? Just curiosity. I was intrigued by Dr Bouvière. I wanted to know more about him. What was that Dr Bouvière’s life like? She smiled. She had asked herself the same question. First appearances would have it that he had never been married, that he took a liking to particular students of his. But did he really like them? They were always the same type: pale, blonde, severe looking, like young Christian girls bordering on mysticism. It had bothered her at first. She felt as if some girls in the meetings looked down on her, as if she wasn’t quite in tune with them. We’re bound to get on, I said to her. I’d never felt in tune with anything either. I thought she must have been like me, a bit lost in Paris, no family ties, trying to find some axis by which to direct our lives and sometimes coming across Dr Bouvière types.

There was one episode with Bouvière that had taken us both by surprise. At one of the meetings the week before, his face was bruised and swollen, as if he had been beaten up: he had a black eye and bruises on his nose and around his neck. He made no mention of what had happened and, to allay suspicion, he was even more brilliant than usual. He engaged with his listeners and kept asking if we understood everything he was saying. The secretary with the hawkish face and the blonde girl with transparent skin watched him with concerned expressions throughout the lecture. At the end, the blonde girl held a compress to his face and, with a smile, he let himself be nursed. No one dared ask him anything about it. ‘Don’t you think it’s a bit odd?’ asked Hélène Navachine, in the calm, jaded tone of those for whom, since childhood, nothing comes as a shock. I almost told her about the woman I had seen in Pigalle with Bouvière, but I couldn’t really imagine her having given him such a beating. Nor any other woman for that matter. No, it must have been something more brutal and disturbing. There was a shady side to Dr Bouvière’s life, perhaps a secret he was ashamed of. I shrugged my shoulders and said to Hélène Navachine that it was just another one of the mysteries of Paris.

She lived in one of the big apartment blocks opposite Gare de Lyon. I said I had an hour to wait until my meeting. She said she would gladly have invited me in so I wouldn’t have to wait outside, but her mother wouldn’t have allowed her to bring someone unannounced to their small apartment at 5 Rue Émile-Gilbert.

*

I saw Hélène Navachine at the next meeting. The bruising had almost disappeared from Dr Bouvière’s face and he wore just a small bandaid on his right cheek. We would never find out who had beaten him up. He would never let it slip. Even the young blonde woman who got in the car with him each week would be none the wiser, I was sure of it. Men die with their secrets.

That evening I asked Hélène Navachine why she was so interested in Hindu music. She said she listened to it because it relieved her of a pressure weighing down on her and it transported her to a place where, finally, she could breathe air that was weightless and clear. And really, it was a silent music. She needed air that was lighter and she needed silence. I understood what she meant. I went with her to her piano lessons. They were mostly in the seventh arrondissement. While I waited for her I went for a walk or, on snowy or rainy afternoons, I took shelter in the café nearest the apartment building she had gone into. The lessons were an hour long. There were three or four of them a day. So, during these breaks, I would walk by myself along the abandoned buildings of the École militaire. I was afraid I would lose my memory and get lost without daring to ask the way. There were not many passers-by and what directions exactly would I ask for?

One afternoon, standing at the end of Avenue de Ségur, on the edge of the fifteenth arrondissement, I was seized by panic. I felt like I was melting into the sort of fog that signals snow. I wanted someone to take me by the arm and say soothing words to me: ‘No, no, it’s nothing, old boy… You must be tired…Let’s go and get you a cognac…You’ll be all right…’ I tried to cling to small concrete details. She had said that she tried to keep things simple for her piano lessons. She made all her students learn the same piece. It was called Bolero, by Hummel. She played it for me one night on a piano we found in the basement of a brasserie. It wouldn’t be long before I could ask her to whistle Hummel’s Bolero. A German who must have made a voyage to Spain. I’d be better off waiting for her in front of the building where she was giving a lesson. What a strange neighbourhood… a metaphysical neighbourhood, as Dr Bouvière might have said, in his voice that was so chilling and so smooth. How feeble of me to let myself get into such a state. All it took was a bit of fog with a hint of snow at the Ségur-Suffren crossroad for me to lose heart. Really, I was being pathetic. It could be the memory of snow falling that afternoon when Hélène Navachine came out of the building, but each time I think back to this period of my life, I can smell snow — or rather, a coolness that chills the lungs and ends up getting confused in my mind with the smell of ether.

One afternoon, after her piano lesson, she slipped and fell on a patch of black ice and cut her hand. It was bleeding. We found a pharmacy a little further down the road. I asked for some cotton wool and, instead of 90 per cent alcohol, I asked for a vial of ether. I don’t think it was a deliberate mistake. We were sitting on a bench. She took the lid off the vial and, as she soaked the cotton wool to apply to her cut, I was hit by the smell of the ether, so strong and so familiar from my childhood. I put the blue vial in my pocket but the smell still hung around us. It permeated the hotel rooms around Gare de Lyon where we used to end up. We would go there before she went home, or when she’d come and meet me there at around nine o’clock at night.

They didn’t ask for your papers at those hotels. There were too many people coming and going because the station was nearby. The clients wouldn’t stay long in their rooms; there would always be a train coming soon to take them away. Shadows.

We were handed forms on which to write our names and addresses, but they never checked if they matched a passport or ID card. I filled them in for both of us. I wrote different names and addresses each time. I made a note of them in a diary so I could change the names the next time. I wanted to cover our tracks as well as our real birthdates, since both of us were still minors. Last year, in an old wallet, I found the page on which I had listed our false identities.

Georges Accad 28 Rue de la Rochefoucauld, Paris 9e

Yvette Dintillac 75 Rue Laugier

André Gabison Calle Jorge Juan 17, Madrid

Jean-Maurice Jedlinski Casa Montalvo, Biarritz

and Marie-José Vasse

Jacques Piche Berlin, Steglitz, Orleanstrasse 2

Patrick de Terouane 21 Rue Berlioz, Nice

Suzy Kraay Vijzelstraat 98, Amsterdam

I was told that each hotel passed these forms on to the vice squad, where they would be arranged in alphabetical order. Apparently they have all since been destroyed, but I don’t believe it. They remain intact in their filing cabinets. One night, just to kill time, a retired police officer started leafing through these old files and he came across André Gabison’s or Marie-José Vasse’s form. He wondered why, after more than thirty years, these people remained missing, unknown at their addresses. He would never know the truth of it. A long time ago, a girl used to give piano lessons. In the hotel rooms around Gare de Lyon where we used to meet, I noticed that they still had the blackout curtains from the civil defence, even though it was many years after the war. We could hear the comings and goings in the corridor, doors slamming, phones ringing. Behind the partition walls, conversations went on late into the night; it sounded like travelling businessmen endlessly discussing their jobs. Heavy footsteps in the corridor, people carrying suitcases. And, despite the commotion, we both managed to reach the realm of silence she talked about, in which the air was lighter to breathe. After a while it felt as if we were the only people in the hotel, that everyone else had left. They had all gone to the station opposite to catch a train. The silence was so deep it made me think of the little train station in a country village near a border, lost in the snow.